


To Meet A Ghost

by Trixree



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season 3 fix-it, i have some feelings about this season and i will be working them out here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:53:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23112013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixree/pseuds/Trixree
Summary: Magic can look like a lot of different things.Sometimes, magic can look like fire and ice, or like glowing psychedelic gateways to Hell and beyond. Sometimes, it looks like cobbled together creatures with bloody maws and rotting bodies. And sometimes, it can look like glowing spiked crowns, like distance mirrors, blood-red rings, and theft of the very mind.But, occasionally, magic looks like the dead returned to us in dreams, desperate to right a wrong.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Sypha Belnades, Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades, Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades
Comments: 4
Kudos: 67





	To Meet A Ghost

Magic can look like a lot of different things. Sypha learns this lesson for the first time when she is just a little girl. 

Sometimes, magic can look like fire and ice, bleeding out from her fingertips, exhaled between her lips, and conducted by her hands. Sometimes, magic looks like luck-charms made of straw and promises, woven together by the last few magicians of a large speaker tribe. Magic looks like the current that runs under the planet’s crust, pure energy and potential. And, sometimes, magic can look like _this_. 

In her dream, a young child is tugging on the sleeve of her cloak.

Sypha looks down at the child. Sightless black eyes stare back up at her. She gasps and staggers a step or two back. _Only a dream,_ she reminds herself. The child—a little boy, with brown hair and red clothing—watches her with dark, empty eye-sockets that drip black ink. Sypha gathers herself. 

(Sometimes, magic can look like the dead, reaching out to deliver one last message.)

“Hello,” she offers, crouching to what would be the child’s eye-level. The spirit of the little boy opens its mouth and a sound like buzzing locusts hisses out between dark, death-stained teeth.

Sypha isn’t shocked, this shit happens too often to her for it to still be alarming. Whether or not they know it, children are linked much more tightly to the innate magic of the world than their adult-counterparts. As such, it is often the spirits of children that most easily find her. 

The boy reaches out and again grabs hold of Sypha’s tunic. He tugs weakly but insistently. And then, oddly, he starts to stomp his feet. 

They’re bare. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Sypha says. Black sludge drips from the boy’s eyes.

The boy opens his mouth and a high whine slithers out of his lungs. He lets go and gets on his knees where he then reaches out and touches Sypha’s feet. His hands are ice cold on the bare skin of her toes, yet his touch is gentle. 

“My feet?” Sypha tries. The boy shakes his head, sending flecks of charcoal-dark tears splattering against her pale skin. “Please, help me understand. I can help you if you tell me what you need.” 

The dead little boy opens his mouth, and even still sleeping, Sypha can feel her heartbeat race. The dream is almost over. 

“Please,” she urges, gathering his face in her hands as gently as she can. There’s no telling whether this spirit will be able to find her again.

 _He took my shoes,_ the little boy weeps, his voice swelling like a horde of screaming night-creatures, like the boiling fever-pitch of a raging wildfire. 

* * *

In the local inn of Lindenfeld, the morning before they are set to storm the priory, Sypha jolts awake with a gasp. 

Trevor is there immediately—his history makes him a light sleeper at the best of times—and before she can say a word, he’s reaching under the bed to grab his short-sword. 

“Just a dream,” Sypha gasps, chest heaving. She stalls him with a hand on his arm while she clears sweat out of her eyes with the other. “Sorry, it was just a nightmare.” 

_He took my shoes._ Sypha exhales on a shudder. She turns to Trevor. 

“I have a really bad feeling about tonight.” 

* * *

She holds the after-image of the little-boy’s spirit sharp in her mind. It is no feat to call fire to her fingertips as her insides burn white-hot in fury. Sypha turns the Judge’s cursed house to ashes as easy as breathing. Trevor is beside her, but it is not his voice that she hears breathe a harsh, raspy _thank you_ over the roar of the flames. Bare feet do not make a sound walking over the soft earth and underbrush.

(For that matter, neither do the feet of the dead.) 

* * *

Both Trevor or Sypha sit awake that night. Every time Sypha closes her eyes, all she can see is that room of little shoes. All she can smell is smoke and the unmistakable scent of burning human corpses. Her own clothes reek like rancid demon blood.

_He took my shoes._

Sypha has been seeing spirits in her dreams ever since her magic first awakened. Even before swarms of Dracula’s night creatures fell upon Wallachia, she’s been intimately accustomed to gore in all its forms. It clings to the spirits of the dead that in turn cling to her and her magic as a kind of channel back to the living world. 

But nothing, absolutely _nothing_ could have prepared her for that room—nothing could have prepared her for that cold little boy’s sightless eyes. 

She shivers in the back of the covered wagon in the dark. 

Honestly, Trevor is no better. He’s quiet and stone-faced beside her, looking every inch the haunted man—the last of his line. Sypha knows they both need to eat, they both need to rest, but all she can taste is her own rage, acrid like bile in her throat. 

She looks at him and thinks, _we’re living his life now. And all I wanted was a bed._

“Where do we go next?” Sypha asks, breaking the heavy silence. Trevor doesn’t so much as twitch. “Trevor.” She nudges him with her foot. “Where do we go?” 

After a moment, he responds. “Away.” 

Neither of them have bothered to light a campfire. They sit in the back of the wagon, in the dark. Alone together. 

“Trevor,” Sypha whispers. She clenches her bloodied hands into the tails of her cloak. “I want… I want to go back.” 

His head snaps up, mouth pulled tight into a snarl. “Are you fucking kidding me?” 

“No—not… not _there._ I meant back to Dracula’s _castle,_ back to…” 

Trevor is silent for a while, and even in the dark, she can see his eyes on her like brands. 

“Why?” He asks. 

Sypha takes a deep, slow breath. “Because I don’t know where else to go.” 

(Dracula's castle is teeming with ghosts, and so is the Belmont hold. But at least they are ghosts she knows.)

* * *

Trevor blinks into a field of soft grass and colorless flowers. It is not a natural field, this he knows for certain. First off, it is silent. It is achingly, oppressively silent and the force of all that is missing from this landscape is as cutting as any blade. _This must be what it is to go deaf_ , Trevor thinks. There is simply no sound at all. 

He sits up and takes stock of himself. There is grass beneath his hands but it is not grass. There are flowers in the distance but they are not flowers. The ground under his body is there but not. 

As Trevor attempts to focus on any single sight or sensation, it is as if all of the characteristics of the thing he’s observing pick themselves up and shift just out of sight. What looks like a sunflower abruptly is Not-Quite a sunflower. The grass that should be green and crisp under his hands is neither green in any sense of the word (but Trevor cannot describe quite what the color it is even _is,_ if it is color at all) nor is it crisp and fresh nor dry and dead.

It skips past all stages of process-able thought and pitches right over into a deep, unnerving _dread._

He can’t even hear himself exhale as he tips his head up to the sky, only to find it to be Not-Quite a sky at all.

It is Not-Quite a ceiling, nor is it a roof. It simultaneously has no depth and spans a much deeper distance than the sea itself. There are clouds that are just slightly _left_ of being clouds—caught somewhere between scuffs on a bedroom ceiling and water-stains from Hell.

 _What the fuck,_ Trevor says, but there is no sound. Even the act of moving his mouth to speak is deeply unsettling, like someone tried to describe the action of “speech” to some alien creature that attempted to recreate such a thing without even the slightest knowledge of how you would go about doing it. 

Trevor is not a man that _panics._ So, he stands up (or, at least, he thinks he does) and he waits. 

He does not wait long.

 _Who are you?_ someone says, and the voice chills him to his core. The accent is thick and he can’t quite put his finger on it. 

Standing just in front of him is a young woman with dark skin and segmented eyebrows. She’s dressed in furs and bits of a colorful robe, possibly Eastern in origin. She looks deeply unimpressed. 

“Who the fuck are _you?”_ Trevor asks. “Where am I?” 

Where the rest of this odd world is cobbled together in all sorts of wrongness, the woman seems exceptionally _normal_. Her expression is bored and flat. Her arms are crossed over her chest. 

_I have to say, I’m disappointed_ , she says. _For the last Belmont, you aren’t much._

“Where—?”

 _\--are you?_ she finishes for him. She raises an eyebrow and extends her arms out wide on either side of herself, as if to say, "look around".

_You aren’t anywhere. But me? I’m dead, Belmont._

He swallows and his own saliva goes down hard, like rocks sinking in a pool. 

“No,” Trevor says, plainly. His thoughts feel heavy and slow, like thick syrup. His words stick to his mouth much the same way as syrup would, dense and cloying. 

She rolls her eyes. _Here, let me show you._

The flesh of her throat opens as easy as a smile. The sick, bloodless peel of her skin stretches from ear to ear across her neck. Suddenly, she’s naked—she wasn’t before. Blood does not fall from the wound. Instead, slick black sludge drips out of it and runs in oily rivulets down her neck. Her throat was cut and she should not be standing--she cannot possibly be standing with a wound like that. 

Trevor looks frantically to her face, because _holy shit_ _—_ only to find that her eyes are gone. Instead, pitch-black sightless sockets stare him down. 

Trevor blinks and— 

_Sumi, knock it off._

She is there, intact. Whole and unmarked. Her smile is grim and sad. 

Beside her is a young man with similarly segmented eyebrows and dark skin. Freckles mark his cheeks. His hair is pulled up into a loose tail. Even their clothes are similar. 

“What the fuck is going on?” Trevor asks. 

_We fucked up,_ the young man says, striding forward. Trevor stumbles back for each step the guy takes. _We’re not gonna hurt you—_ he glances at the woman— _I actually don’t think we can._

 _Just—look,_ the woman interrupts. _You’re the Belmont, right?_

The boy’s eyes are wide, panic-wide. _Please say yes because you’re probably the only one that can help us._

The woman looks grave. _We’ve done something terrible and the consequences might be dire for the whole world. Please—_

* * *

Trevor wakes in the back of the cart, positively drenched in sweat and gasping for breath he doesn’t have. Sypha is at his side in an instant. 

“Trevor—!” She shouts. He rockets to his feet, scrambling out of the wagon with uncooperative limbs. 

He makes it only a few feet away before he collapses and vomits straight bile. 

* * *

“Sypha,” Trevor starts, his voice rough with disuse. Ever since his violent awakening at dawn, neither of them have spoken much. The road that stretches before them is quiet and familiar. They traveled it just a week ago. 

She hums in response. She’s been so quiet, so withdrawn since Lindenfeld. Not that he can fucking blame her. It’s like Sypha is gearing up for something more. (He can almost feel the rage underneath her skin like a current. Trevor knows it because he can feel it in himself, too.) 

“I have a really bad feeling about this.” 

The road back to Dracula’s castle stretches out before them. 

* * *

Adrian does not get off of the floor. 

Wind howls through the gaping hole in the window. The night air is cold. But still, the blood splattered on his sheets and his naked body is _colder_. He imagines that if he were to reach out and take his father’s wedding ring in his hand, it too would be cold. He can’t muster the energy to find out. 

Thoughts are slow and heavy, like congealed blood and brain matter. It’s all he can do to keep breathing, keep pulling in desperate gasps for air through lungs that don’t want to cooperate, through tears that sting the wounds on his chest. _Fuck._ His _chest._

They’ve _branded him._ Crisscrossing livid lines intersect his largest scar, courtesy of his father. They wrap like vines across his arms and shoulders and his wrists— _fuck—_ whatever consecrated tool they used to hold him left deep, festering burns around his wrists. They’re going to be incredibly damning scars. 

Adrian cannot get off of the floor. He doesn’t fucking _want_ to get off of the floor. What’s the goddamn point when he’s just going to be— 

_Alone._

(But, it’s a whisper of a touch, far away and barely there and then—)

There is only silence and the taste of his own tears. 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyways-- I have some feelings about season 3. 
> 
> Find me on [ye olden tumblr](https://trixree.tumblr.com/)


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